Smart Parking for All: Equipped and Non-equipped Vehicles in Smart Cities

The current trend in designing cities is to think them as smart environments that are constantly connected with road users. For this purpose, a smart city is implemented as a collection of IoT (Internet-of-Things) powered devices set up in order to connect vehicles to their surrounding infrastructure. In this way, road users share their intentions while retrieving useful information from the smart city itself. This complex and distributed system must be then tailored to improve viability performance metrics such as reducing traffic congestion, optimizing accident response and everything else related to transportation in urban areas. In this work we focus on parking management in a scenario in which next generation vehicles will be able to communicate with the surrounding infrastructure and will coexist with traditional vehicles with limited or absent IoT-capabilities. We propose a reservation mechanism able to exploit communication at infrastructure level, with the goal of reducing the time needed to find a free parking spot close to destination. We evaluate our proposed mechanisms using the well known MATSim transport simulator.